Knowledge about the impact of telework on management and business: A conceptual study

The need remains for a review of the literature devoted to telework, due to the exponential growth of this work format, as well as to the consequent increase in the number of publications about it. For this reason, the aim sought with this study consists in analysing the literature on telework from a Management and Business perspective. For that purpose, we examined 156 articles taken from the Social Science Citation database of the Web of Science. A content analysis about the articles in question was likewise performed in order to determine the topics underlying the telework phenomenon as a whole. The journals related to Organisation, Psychology, Technological Innovation, Gender and even Ethics also discussed these themes, revealing the transversal nature and the manifold implications of this labour modality. The main limitation faced in this research has to do with the way to select the papers under study, which can leave aside important publications dealing with telework, insofar as books, papers presented at conferences and other types of non-academic works have not been considered. The model proposed from the literature review makes it possible to see that the implementation of teleworking has had both clearly positive consequences ―e.g. staff retention, innovation and flexibility― and negative ones, among them loss of privacy, higher discrimination, stress or the isolation of the teleworker, along with variables that present ambiguous values suggesting positive as well as negative effects, such as the relationships between telework and performance, or between the former and the work/life balance, or also between teleworking and the satisfaction/well-being of the individuals who carry out this activity. The model, which can be utilised and tested in future research works, includes effects which, due to their ambiguity, require further research and deeper understanding.